Discandying Cleopatra

Discandying Cleopatra: Preserving Cleopatra's Infinite Variety in Shakespeare's "Antony
and Cleopatra"
Author(s): Jennifer Park
Source: Studies in Philology , Summer, 2016, Vol. 113, No. 3 (Summer, 2016), pp. 595-633
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921900
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Discandying Cleopatra:
Preserving Cleopatra's Infinite
Variety in Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra
by Jennifer Park
Taking Shakespeare's unique use of the term " discandying " as a starting point , this
essay argues that Shakespeare's preoccupation with food preservation in Antony and
Cleopatra extends and complicates a tradition interested in preservation more broadly
construed, a tradition represented and embodied by the figure of Cleopatra as a medi-
cal, gynecological, and alchemical authority on renewal. Believed into the early modern
period to be the author of an apparent Book of Cleopatra, Cleopatra as a figure comes
to be intimately associated with preservation and the promise of immortality. Shake-
speare reimagines the figure of Cleopatra as a product of an early modern preservative
culture, drawing from both ancient tradition and contemporary domestic practices to
produce a figure of and for consumption. Cleopatra demonstrates that far from being a
process toward permanence, preservation is both dynamic and organic, requiring the
potency of the "foreign" integrated with the domestic to rethink what it means to perse-
vere in the face of discandying.
Cleopatra invokes the "discandying of this pelleted storm."1 In the

IN next Cleopatra
next act, one act, describes
Antony of Antonythetheheartsinvokes
of hismost describes
followers enigmatic the "discandying the of hearts her speeches, of of his this followers pelleted William that storm."1 Shakespeare's "discandy" In the
that "discandy"
and "melt their sweets" on Caesar (4.12.22). The term "discandy" evokes
a particularly visceral image of the reverse process of candying, a pro-
1 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 3.13.67. All subsequent quotations from Antony and Cleopatra are
from this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text by act, scene, and line
number.
595
© 2016 Studies in Philology, Incorporated

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596 Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
cess involving the melting of sugar to form a hardened, "candied" shell.

And yet the term that describes such a powerful and accessible image-
discandying- is unique to Shakespeare and unique to the play.2 The
question is, why might Shakespeare have used discandying only in
Antony and Cleopatra ? And why does it appear twice in a play about
Egypt?
Recent postcolonial readings of Antony and Cleopatra's depiction of
Egypt have emphasized the "'Otherness' of Egypt."3 Readings of other-
ness have tended to view the play as a warning about the exotic as ex-
cess even while acknowledging the blurring of the proposed Rome/
Egypt dichotomy. Gluttonous surfeiting, lavish banquets, and feasting,
as in the feast described by Enobarbus, are all depicted as a quality
of Egypt's exoticism- the "'orientalism' of Cleopatra's court- with its
luxury, decadence, splendour, sensuality, [and] appetite," which John
Gillies sees as a "systematic inversion of the legendary Roman values
of temperance, manliness, courage, and pietas ."4 Mary Thomas Crane
notes how this is also reflected in the "cognitive orientation" of the
Romans in the play, who perceive their world as "composed largely of
hard, opaque, human-fashioned materials" and divided into "almost
obsessively named- and conquered- cities and nations."5 This speaks
to what I see as a tradition of privileging monumentalism in the his-
tory of the West, drawing from classical tropes of memorial and per-
manence that figure into what I have argued elsewhere are the mascu-
linely coded and externally directed "markers of identity" that were
2 The most recent entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists in the definition that
future uses of the term are "Freq. with allusion to Shakespeare's use" ( OED Online, s.v.
"discandy, v.," June 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53657
?redirectedFrom=discandy [accessed July 18, 2014]).
3 Mary Thomas Crane, "Roman World, Egyptian Earth: Cognitive Difference and Em-
pire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ," Comparative Drama 43 (2009): 1. See also Ania
Loomba, "The Theatre and the Space of the Other in Anthony and Cleopatra ," in Shake-
speare's Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Susanne L. Wofford (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1996), 235-48. Loomba discusses the various imperialist and
racial implications of the Rome/Egypt dichotomy in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
for England, tracing the history of Western perceptions of the East and the conflation of
Egyptians with Moors, Turks, and gypsies, all identified by darker skin.
4 John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 118.
5 Crane, "Roman World, Egyptian Earth," 2. See also Jyotsna Singh, "Renaissance Anti-
theatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra/' Renaissance Drama
20 (1989): 99-121. Singh reads the Rome/Egypt dichotomy in conjunction with a male/
female binary, in which Cleopatra's "infinite variety" is the antithesis of the Roman model
of stability and masculinity.

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Jennifer Park 597
"historical, genealogical, and patriarchal/'6 Cran
surface "world" of the Romans with the Egypt
as "yielding, encompassing, generative, and resi
sion and mastery," reading the latter as a kind of
ing theory of the material world, the pre-seven
of elements and humors." For Gillies that nostal
through its ties to the present and "shapes Shak
of marginal, outlandish, barbarous, and exotic n
in need of control by the rational and self-contr
My argument here diverges from and complica
forward by scholars like Crane and Gillies, p
at how exactly the blurring between two dispar
Shakespeare's "relatively positive description of
nostalgia for a declining sixteenth-century theory o
as Crane suggests, my sense is that Shakespeare
models of materiality and physiology, develope
tices, to demonstrate just how the porousness o
tween the Romans and Egyptians, the West and t
itself. I argue that Shakespeare's primary purpos
struct Egyptian exoticism but rather to couch th
in English domestic culture as a commentary on
consumption, creating an uneasy tension betwee
exotic within the figure of the foreign woman.8
6 See my "Navigating Past, Potential, and Paradise: The G

Discovery and Creation in Francis Godwin's Man in the Moo
Blazing World," in Gendering Time and Space in Early Modern Eng
and Alysia Kolentsis, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissanc
7 Crane, "Roman World, Egyptian Earth," 2-3; and Gillies,
phy of Difference, 4.
8 For an extensive look at the phenomenon of Cleopatra's
of the speculation about her race, see Francesca T. Royster, Be
ing Image of an Icon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Ca
the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage
Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the
MD: University Press of America, 2000); Sally-Ann Ashton,
Blackwell Publishing, 2008); and Gillies, Shakespeare and the G
ter and Rutter interrogate the social constructions and perf
Habib provides context for the history of Graeco-Egyptian
tion of a mixed Graeco-Egyptian race to speculate about C
heritage, which Ashton, an Egyptologist, confirms. Gillie
oticizing of Cleopatra in the context of differing historical
nicity-ethnically Greek in Plutarch's account rather than
exotic, in Virgil's account.

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She is at once "Salt Cleopatra" and "sweet queen." Even her descrip-
tion as "wrinkled deep in time" can be construed as a gustatory de-
scriptor given to Shakespeare's Cleopatra that references preservation
practices that kept things from immediate decay and heightened fla-
vors from salty to sweet. The play that has been held to be a commen-
tary on Egypt is deeply informed by the notion of food preservation-
a concept that includes salting, pickling, brining, and candying. The
Romans see their legacy played out in the fantasy of conquering Egypt,
with Cleopatra as a stand-in for her nation as well, incorporating its
qualities. In suggesting the irony in the Roman veneer of a stoic, monu-
mental, marble solidity indicative of republican ideals of duty and self-
sacrifice, the play demonstrates Roman republicanism masking as a
front for a culture obsessed with destructive consumption; at the same
time that they repudiate Egypt as a site of excess and extravagance, the
Romans themselves are the ones who consume or seek to consume.
As the Romans seek to indulge in foreign foods and foreign customs,
Roman conquerors, like Antony and Caesar before him, seek to con-
sume Cleopatra as a temptation to the sexual appetite that mirrored the
tantalizing Egyptian appeal to gluttony and feasting. But Egypt's and
Cleopatra's own preservative elements make them resistant, in some
ways, to such incorporation. Egypt rather has longer standing associa-
tions with preservation due to the nature of its space and time- the re-
gional climate and Egypt's identification as the oldest civilization, pro-
ducing preserved bodies and dry complexions but also fecundity and
generation.
Furthermore, Shakespeare's preoccupation with food preservation
in this play extends and complicates an ancient tradition interested in
preservation more broadly construed, a tradition represented and em-
bodied by the figure of Cleopatra as a medical, gynaecological, and
alchemical authority. Believed into the early modern period to be the
author of an apparent Book of Cleopatra, Cleopatra as a figure comes to be
intimately associated with preservation and the promise of immortality.
Shakespeare, I argue, reimagines the figure of Cleopatra as an epitome
of an early modern preservative culture alongside her long history in
medical and scientific tradition as a mistress of preservation. Shake-
speare uses his construction of Cleopatra to show how the English de-
sired to incorporate some of her qualities- her place in history and her
promise of longevity- but they sought these qualities, fascinatingly,
through kitchen and domestic work. His Cleopatra provides a model
and an embodiment of preservation that withstands or subverts Roman

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Jennifer Park 599
ideas of permanence, with Antony, too, adopting
ing in the threat of his own unpreserving. Cleop
far from being a process toward permanence, pr
namic and organic, requiring the potency of th
with the domestic to rethink the nature of me
what it means to persevere in the face of discand
CLEOPATRA'S ANCIENT MEDICAL AUTHORITY
Overlooked in studies of circulating receipts in a growing

domestic culture is the remarkable example of a receipt tr
uted to Cleopatra. Early modern records indicate that the
parent Book of Cleopatra of which the English were awar
medical knowledge that no longer exists except in the v
references to it from authors and writers spanning all th
ancient Greek and Roman authorities. Cleopatra's was a
legacy that was as real as it was complex and elusive; the
patra held information about preserving and touted the co
ervation as the domain of "Cleopatra's" expertise.
The figure of Cleopatra closer to her time was closely a
medicine, cosmetics, gynecology, and alchemy, and the c
her medical authority is comprised of not one but three s
ditions of medical thought. The earliest is of ancient m
most famously that of Galen, where is preserved cosmet
bear Cleopatra's name and are extracted from a book calle
In the late antique Latin and medieval Latin tradition
held to be an authority on gynecology, with her name us
authority of two gynecological works: the Gynaecia, cont
logical treatments, and the Pessaria, containing receipts f
positories.9 During this time, Albertus Magnus wrote his Bok
in which Cleopatra's recipes figure, and the earlier thirte
Thomas of Cantimpré composed his primary work, On t
Things , which contained a section on the human body, p
gynecology based on Cleopatra alongside figures like Ga
cenna. Thirdly, we have the Arabic medical tradition, in w
indications that Cleopatra is remembered as a "writer on a
with expertise in recipes for aphrodisiacs. The Arabic m
9 Steven Muir and Laurence Totelin, "Medicine and Disease/' in A Cu
Women in Antiquity, ed. Janet H. Tulloch (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 10
10 Ibid.

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6oo Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
known in the West as Costa ben Luca (820-912 C.E.) referred to a book
on aphrodisiacs by Cleopatra and appears to be the original source
from which a number of early modern authors received the receipt for
the renewal of love, desire, and the ability for sexual intercourse:
I remember a great nobleman of this country who complained of being in a liga-
ture that prevented him from having intercourse with women. ... [I brought]
him the Book of Cleopatra, the one she devoted to enhancing women's beauty,
and [read] the passage where it says that one so ligated should take raven's gall
mixed with sesame oil and apply it by smearing it all over the body. Upon hear-
ing that, he had confidence in the words of the book and did it, and as soon as he
was delivered [from the ligature] his desire for intercourse increased.11
In addition to the medical traditions, the preservative authority of Cleo-

patra also draws upon an ancient alchemical tradition. Cleopatra the
alchemist is one of the great figures in ancient alchemy; a work called
the Dialogue of Cleopatra and the Philosophers , in part attributed to Cleo-
patra, would, as Stanton Linden notes, influence "much of the alchemi-
cal imagery and rhetoric of the Renaissance/'12 In antiquity, gynecol-
ogy had a large influence on alchemical imagery, and medical work in
cosmetics, gynecological treatises, and sex manuals had a great deal of
overlap. When we define these areas of expertise as characterized by a
concern with preservation, we more easily see the connections between
them: subsequently Cleopatra becomes as an expert in cosmetics, an au-
thority in the preservation of beauty and health; as an expert in gyne-
cology and alchemy, an authority on the preservation of reproduction
and life; and as an expert in aphrodisiaca, an authority on the preserva-
tion of eroticism and sexual appeal.
Cleopatra's reputation thus exceeds her. In their discussion of an-
cient women in medicine, Steven Muir and Laurence Totelin describe
a woman in the position of a medical authority as "a model or example
whose legendary reputation lives on in the stories and practices of later
generations."13 Cleopatra's name attributed to these medical recipes
was a "particularly good choice" given the queen Cleopatra's fame
for beauty and luxury and her connection with Egypt, which was "fa-
mous for its production of scented oils and ointments."14 Attributing
11 Quoted in Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 50.
12 Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44.
13 Muir and Totelin, "Medicine and Disease/' 84.
14 Ibid., 102.

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Jennifer Park 601
to Queen Cleopatra a medical authority in this r
ing that medical writers and compilers of receipt
believed the queen of Egypt had legitimately be
of cosmetology, inspiring them to include recip
such as "an unguent of Queen Cleopatra" in A
Medical Collection , and a recipe for brightening
royal Cleopatra in the medical writings of Metr
that Queen Cleopatra was famous for her love aff
tion lent credence to Costa ben Luca's reference
aphrodisiacs.16
Thus beyond Cleopatra's fame in western cu
queen, there is evidence that early moderns ass
a rich culture of preservation dating back to an
speare's own time, and continuing well into the
the Book of Cleopatra appears in a range of early m
and texts that refer to Cleopatra and her Book a
pertise include Magnus and his Boke of Secretes
Wits Theater of the Little World (1599), Edward Jor
of a disease called the suffocation of the mother (16
The chyrugians closet (1630), and Thomas Muffet'
the sheer range of specialties covered by these
pilations of beneficial reading material, surgery
natural philosophy and the natural sciences- we
work was found to be pertinent in multiple field
to be legitimate and efficacious. Even in the lat
Swiss physician Johannes Jacob Wecker's work,
translation in 1660 as Eighteen Books of the Secrets
The Summe and Substance of Naturall Philosophy an
ace as "an Encyclipaedia of Arts and Sciences," lis
authors.17
It was thus that receipts advertised as secrets b

were sold and made accessible to the early moder
Cleopatra makes its appearance in these early mo
of firsthand receipts as well as secondhand refer
a booke of the preservation of womens beauty," R
section on Beauty in his edited prose commonplac
is Ibid.
16 Ibid., 103.
17 Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature, Being The Summe and Substance of
Naturall Philosophy (London, 1660), A2r.

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6o2 Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
the Little World (1599).18 This is confirmed by the appearance of receipts

for preserving beauty in other early modern texts; the English transla-
tion of Magnus's Boke of Secretes (1599) states,
And it is saide in the booke of Cleopatrr [sic]. If a woman haue not anie delec-
tation with her husband take the marrowe of a wolfe, of his left foote, and beare
it, and she will loue no man but him. And it is saide, when the lefte hippe or
hance of a male Ostrich is taken and boiled, or seethed with Oile, and after the
begining or grounde of haires are anointed with it they grow neuer againe.19
Here are two descriptive receipts, marked by their beginning "And it is

saide [in the Book of Cleopatra ]," the first of which reads as a recipe for
a renewal of love between a woman and her husband, the second, for
the permanent stopping of hair growth, both apparently taken from her
book. Another cosmetically minded receipt, this time for hair growth,
appears in Thomas Bonham's The chyrugian's closet (1630), in which
Cleopatra is credited in the "Alphabeticall Catalogue of the Authors of
this Worke." Bonham provides two brief receipts attributed to her in
this "chyrugian's" compendium, listed in standard medical receipt for-
mat. The first, after listing ingredients for an unguent, reads,
Rx. Cort: arundinis, & Spuma nitri, ana {ounce} ss. pieis liquida, q. s. f. vng. * . To
restore hayre in an inueterate Alopecia [or baldness]. It will be [B] very profit-
able daily to shaue the place, and to rub it with a lin | nen cloath, and then to
anoint it, by which meanes the hayre will grow with more speed. Cleopatra.20
The second, after listing ingredients for another unguent and abbrevi-
ated instructions for preparation, notes simply:
Rx. Brassicae aridae, q.s. stampe it cum aq: q.s. vnto the forme of an vng: *. To
preserue haire from falling. Cleopatra. [C]21
Both entries, purporting to aid hair growth or preserve hair from fall-
ing, end with the attribution "Cleopatra" to identify the source of the
receipts. A related recipe from the Book of Cleopatra makes a perhaps un-
expected appearance in Muffet's work on insects, which was completed
in manuscript form in the 1590s and posthumously published and
appended in English translation to Edward Topsell's work on beasts
(1658). Muffet accounts in his section "On the use of Flies" yet another
receipt for the cure for baldness:
18 Allott, Wits Theater of the Little World (London, 1599), 75V.

19 Magnus, Boke of Secretes (London, 1599), G4r-v.
20 Bonham, The chyrugian's closet (London, 1630), 283.
21 Ibid.

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Jennifer Park 603
For Galen out of Saranus, Asele | piades, Cleopatra, and
Medicines against the disease called Alopecia or the F
them either by themselves or mingled with other thin
Cleopatra's Book de Ornatu. Take five grains of the he
them on the head affected with this disease, and it will
Here again we find a descriptive receipt for the r

described as a kind of cure. Additionally, here w
for Cleopatra's book: the "Book de Ornatu" or b
as in beauty and cosmetology.
In addition to Cleopatra's hair remedies, Cleop
edge appears again in the form of more occult
den mentions the Book of Cleopatra as a source f
example of "fasten[ing] some cure vpon" tho
witched, in his treatise on the "suffocation of th
furthers his argument that witchcraft can be ex
causes:
So that if we cannot moderate these perturbations of the mi

perswasions, or by alluring their mindes another way, we m
firme them in their fantasies, that wee may the better fas
them: as Constantinus Affricanus (if it be his booke which
Galens workes, De incantatione, adiuratione &c.) affirmeth,
good successe, vpon one who was impotens ad Venerem, & th
witched therewith, by reading vnto him a foolish medicine
made with a crowes gall, and oyle: whereof the patient took
that vpon the vse of it he presently recouered his strength an
Cleopatra's name appears to stand in for her book, fr

"medicine" is taken. A similar receipt is echoed in We
secrets, in a section on "Secrets of Generation and Ve
sexual pleasure]." This recipe, "For those that are bewit
The Pye eaten will recover those that are bewitched, as som
fume of a dead mans tooth, and if the whole body be annoi
gall, and oyl of Sesama, that will do it also. Ex Cleopatra 24
This receipt is reiterated in his later section on "Secret

ration." Regarding recipes for "What must be done wh
22 Muffet, The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser living Creatures , as, Bee
Svidrs, Worms, &c. a most Elaborate Work (London, 1658), 945.
23 Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of
1603), 24V.
24 Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature, 104.

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6oą Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
dered that they cannot lye with their Wives," Wecker includes the fol-
lowing advice:
There is one reports that a Noble Man of his Countrey [this may well be Costa
ben Luca, as per the reference earlier] swore that he enchanted a Man that he
should never lye with his Wife, and that he was restored by a certain dexterity,
whereby he confirmed the perswasion of another, bringing to him the Book of
Cleopatra, which he had written concerning the ugliness of Women, and he
read the place where it was prescribed that one that was so charmed should
have his whole body annointed with the gall of a Crow, mingled with Oyl of Se-
samam; and that the remedy was certain.25
Wecker directly references the Book of Cleopatra as a material text-

"bringing to him the Book of Cleopatra" -and as the source of the afore-
mentioned receipt. These early modern examples, from both medical
experts and non-experts, show us how knowledge from the Book of Cleo-
patra came to be circulated and the figure of Cleopatra perpetuated as
an authority on preservation.
From these fragments of evidence we piece together an idea of who
Cleopatra represented for the early moderns rather than a biography of
a specific individual. The author who apparently wrote the Book of Cleo-
patra and any other medical treatises and recipes was not the Cleopatra
we have inherited as arguably our most famous Cleopatra- Cleopatra
VII, former queen of Egypt, Shakespeare's Cleopatra. However, this
seems not to have mattered much in the transmission and preserva-
tion of the figure of Cleopatra and her book of expertise. As a scholar
who focuses on classical history, Totelin has convincingly read Cleo-
patra in early Greek medical writings as an example of what she terms a
"royal veneer," famous or well-known names that writers attributed to
recipes for the purpose of giving them a kind of authority. As such, she
and Muir argue, it is better to refer to such female figures as "authori-
ties," rather than "authors of" these recipes.26 Where Muir and Totelin
refer to Cleopatra in these medical writings as a pseudonym, I think it
fruitful for our purposes to consider the resulting composite Cleopatra
of the medical traditions alongside the figure of Queen Cleopatra in
the historical tradition as, together, a figuration. It seems to me that the
definition of figuration- the action or process of forming into a figure,
or the resulting form or shape, contour, outline- may most accurately
describe what "Cleopatra" ends up being, or meaning, into the early
25 Ibid., 28i.
26 Muir and Totelin, "Medicine and Disease/7 100.

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Jennifer Park 605
modem period. From early on, the potency of th
Queen of Egypt, allowed it to subsume the othe
come and gone and contributed something to th
tion, whether that be Cleopatra the gynecologist
mist.
I want to pause here for a moment to consid
figures- the medical authority and the histo
separately in order to point out the two threads of
are at play here and that are being woven toget
posite Cleopatra figuration. The one is Cleopatr
torical tradition, constructed by "historical" (if
upon narrative throughout the centuries, as in h
ful ruler, gypsy, and seductress in Shakespeare's
The other, lesser known, and the one I highlight
medical or receipt tradition, constructed by th
of evidence that attribute various medical and p
to "Cleopatra." The Book of Cleopatra proves a t
overlooked, of a Cleopatra memorialized throug
to narrative. Furthermore, as I argue, the prese
memory in the form of these receipts and fragm
edge constructs her cultural significance for Sh
her memory in narrative alone does not. Shakesp
these traditions, adds to them another, one that
porary cultural milieu: a new English tradition o
doing so, Shakespeare uses the culinary, as a new
to the definition of preservation, to bridge the
memory constructed by the tradition of Cleopa
and a historical memory of Cleopatra construct
her life and loves. In coupling these memorial l
tributes to the memory-making efforts of pres
ing from a tradition of Cleopatra as preservative
her in the realm of contemporary culinary prese
ANCIENT LEGACY AND EARLY MODERN

DOMESTIC PRACTICES
What did it mean to preserve? The idea of preserving, i

language, first applied to the vulnerable human body
Ages. The first known use of the verb "to preserve" app
Gower's 1393 Confessio Amantis, according to the OED, in

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
states, "forto kepe and to preserve The bodi fro siknesses alle." Gower's
example is listed for the primary definition of "to preserve": "To protect
or save from (injury, sickness, or any undesirable eventuality)."27 As the
use of the word evolved, later definitions still focused, at first, on the
human body as the object of preservation; to preserve meant "To keep
alive; to keep from perishing," and in medicine "to prevent (a disease or
its development, a complication); to palliate or keep from worsening."
By 1427, the definition extended beyond the human body, defining "to
preserve" more abstractly as "to keep in its original or existing state; to
make lasting; to maintain or keep alive (a memory, name, etc.)."
It is not until the 1500s that we see the definition of "to preserve" ex-
panded to include the culinary. The OED records 1563 as the first use of
"to preserve" as "to prepare (fruit, meat, etc.) by boiling with sugar, salt-
ing, or pickling so as to prevent decomposition or fermentation." This
corresponds with the sudden influx of food preservation recipes that
entered en masse into sixteenth-century receipt culture, in tandem with
what Jennifer Stead calls a "spectacular increase of activity in food pres-
ervation" in the sixteenth century,28 both derived from and developing
on receipts cultivated throughout the centuries. Accordingly, with the
culinary entering into the primary definitions of "to preserve" in the
English language, culinary preservation, as we see, would influence
the culture's understanding of preservation as a concept. In time, the
material processes of culinary preservation would serve as the primary
metaphor for the idea of preservation more broadly construed; by the
end of the seventeenth century Vincent Alsop would describe his reli-
gious concerns using the terms of culinary preservation:
I would fain know how the Church was Conserved in the Early, purer times of
Christ, and his Apostles? They had not recourse to the Ladies Closet open'd,
They understood nothing of the Modern curious Arts of Conserving, candying,
and preserving Religion in Ceremonious Syrrups; and yet Religion kept sweet,
and Good 29
27 OED Online , s.v. "preserve, v./' June 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed
.com/view/Entry/i50728?rskey=CXAVsN&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed July 18,
2014).
28 Stead, "Necessities and Luxuries: Food Preservation from the Elizabethan to the
Georgian Era," in " Waste Not, Want Not": Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present
Day, ed. C. Anne Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 66.
29 Alsop, Melius inquirendum, or, A sober inquirie into the reasonings of the Serious inquirie
wherein the inquirers cavils against the principles, his calumnies against the prêachings and prac-
tises of the non-conformists are examined, and refelled, and St. Augustine, the synod of Dort and
the Articles of the Church of England in the Quinquarticular points, vindicated (1678), 211.

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 607
Shakespeare's Cleopatra thus appears at a time w
vation and advancements in preservation in the
kitchen were evolving side by side. Correspond
dying, and pickling began to serve as metaphor
rived from advancements in food preservation i
ture.
Thus, when Shakespeare uses the term "discandy," he does so inten-

tionally at a moment in history during which culinary ingredients and
culinary processes begin to define preservation. To fully emphasize the
significance of Shakespeare's use of the term, I must begin by noting
here that "discandy" is a term and a concept that is entirely Shake-
speare's invention. Furthermore, the word "discandy" only appears in
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ; not only is it absent in all of his
other works, but thus far it does not appear in any other work in the
history of the English language. "Discandy" was one of Shakespeare's
new words, developed out of a culinary image, derived from "candy"
in its noun form (i.e., in "sugar-candy," another name for sugar), turn-
ing it into its verb form (candying as a preservative process using sugar-
candy), and finally attaching the prefix "dis-" to coin "discandy" as the
reverse of "to candy."30 Candying, more specifically, was a process by
which fruits, roots, and flowers were preserved using sugar; the candy-
ing process involved "boiling with sugar, which crystallizes and forms
a crust."31
Early modern women were becoming increasingly familiar with can-

dying as a culinary process, as well as recipes for preserving and con-
serving intended for the early modern English housewife. These were
domesticated into the rapidly growing genre of the receipt book, both
in private manuscript form kept within the familial household and in
printed form, as recipe books and domestic manuals, for public con-
sumption. One example of the latter was the anonymous A Closet for
Ladies and Gentlewomen, Or , The Art of presenting, Consenting, and Candy-
ing. With the manner howe to make diuers kinds of Syrups: and all kind of ban-
queting stuffes. Also diuers soueraigne Medicines and Salues, for sundry Dis-
eases (1608), roughly contemporaneous with the writing of Antony and
Cleopatra . From the title alone, we can gather several things: 1) that the
30 Terttu Nevalainen, "Shakespeare's New Words," in Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic

Language: A Guide, ed. Sylvia Adamson (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 237-55.
31 OED Online , s.v. candy, v., June 2014, Oxford University Press, http:y/www.oed
.com/view/Entry/270i3?rskey=KRMTH9&result=4&isAdvanced=false (accessed July 18,
2014).

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anonymous manual was meant for "Ladies and Gentlewomen" implies

that the following arts and receipts were considered the domain of the
early modern woman; 2) the arts of preserving, conserving, and candy-
ing were grouped together- and I will speak of them as a grouping as
the culinary preservative arts; and 3) the making of syrups, banqueting
stuffs, and medicines, as diverse and various as they seem, were all re-
lated to the preservative arts.
Within the domestic manual itself, the clean categories the title sug-
gests did not exist, of course; rather, in broadly construed categories,
such as "An especiall note of Confectionary," "Here beginneth Banquet-
ing conceits, as Marmalades, Quodiniackes, and such like," and "Cor-
dial Waters," recipes ranging from preserving gooseberries to making
syrup of violets to "A medicine for Rupture in old or yong" were col-
lected without strict organization. Only an occasional note at the bot-
tom of a page, "Heere endeth the Preseruatiues," indicated any division
of categories, but these, too, were misleading, because the preserves,
for example, didn't always end as stated.32 That preservative recipes
appeared throughout the book shows how central the concept of pres-
ervation was to the cookery and kitchen experimentation of the early
modern domestic household. Among recipes for preservation, those for
candying boasted titles that were especially telling about what candy-
ing in particular promised for the early modern woman interested in
preserving. One such receipt is titled, "To Candy Rose leaues as natu-
rally as if they grew vpon the Tree"; the directions state,
Take of the fayrest Rose leaues, red or dammaske, and on a Sun-shine day
sprinkle them with Rose water, and lay them one by one vpon faire paper,
then take some double refined suger, and beat it very fine, and put it in a fine
lawne searce, when you haue layd abroad all the Rose leaues in the hottest of
the sunne, searce suger thinly all ouer them, then anon the Sun will candy the
suger, then turne the leaues, and searce suger on the other side, and turne them
often in the Sun, sometimes sprinkling Rose water, & sometimes searsing suger
on them, vntill they be ynough, and come to your liking: and being thus done,
you may keepe them.33
The mimetic function of the recipe, to candy the leaves "as naturally as if
they grew vpon the Tree," demonstrates the desire to preserve items as
32 Anonymous, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, Or, The Art of preseruing, Con-
seruing, and Candying. With the manner howe to make diuers kinds of Syrups: and all kind of
banqueting stuffes. Also diuers soueraigne Medicines and Salues, for sundry Diseases (London,
1608), 15.
33 Ibid., 17-18.

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Jennifer Park 609
they are in nature, to "keepe them" in their nat
in another recipe, labeled "To Candy all manner
rali colours," for which one must take "the flo
and wash them ouer with a little Rose water, w
is dissolued, then take fine searsed suger, and
them a drying on the bottome of a siue in an ou
as if it were Suger-candy."34 Other candying re
that the aim is to "keepe them all the yeare."35
plicit the purpose and benefit of candying: the
women to preserve things as close as possible t
were in their living, or last present, state- in a
time. These preservative aims of candying, alon
tion more broadly as prolonging shelf life, will
speare's climactic moment of discandying in th
But additionally, early modern English dome
isolated; rather, perhaps unexpectedly, these
were informed by foreign influence. By the ti
reached early modern England, the English wer
candied products via the exotic candied goods t
Europe. Early modern domestic practices, execu
private household, were not quite so safely do
was well aware. The underlying threat of the
Shakespeare's depiction of Cleopatra as both a
eign land and an early modern expert of domes
Cleopatra is Shakespeare's only female prot
"tawny front" is a marker of difference, and that
the encroachment of the foreigft and "other" upo
modern English domestic space. The promine
pean fear of miscegenation was complicated by
that promoted the idea of alteration in the bod
"imperial consumers": "You are what you eat, w
you own."36 This mantra- that you are what
for the Galenic dietetic framework of the hum
one's makeup was constructed by what one ate
composed of and maintained by local diet, "the
34 Ibid., 18-19.
35 Ibid., 20.
36 Mary Baine Campbell, "Maculophobia: Blackness, Whiteness and Cosmetics in
Early Imperial Britain," in Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance, ed. James P. Heifers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 121.

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6io Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
land where the body itself lived and that was prepared as it was tra-
ditionally prepared/'37 The distinction of a local diet developed out of
custom, the idea that "I cannot be hurt by the use of things that I have
been long accustomed to," as Michel de Montaigne expressed in his
essay "Of Experience/'38 Because bodies were accustomed to local fare,
dietary "exoticism" put the domestic body at risk. At the same time, the
colonizing impulse of the Age of Discovery spurred a sense of urgency
among competing European nations to claim undiscovered regions of
the world, and, for practical reasons, these European nations began ex-
perimenting with food preservation out of necessity to accommodate
ships with food that would be able to last months and even years dur-
ing the long journeys abroad 39 Travel thus became the impetus for new
advancements in food preservation. These voyages abroad not only
brought back to Europe different and exotic foodstuffs, newly "discov-
ered" flora and fauna of foreign regions, but also unprecedented quan-
tities of preservative ingredients, like "the increased supply of sugar
from Caribbean islands and North Africa," resulting in a "veritable ex-
plosion of new methods" of preservation.40
The context, thus, for the Roman anxiety about Cleopatra as a morsel
and Egypt as a place of excess in Shakespeare's play is the concern of
early modern European colonists, who were "anxious about the pos-
sible effects of exposure to an exotic environment, and especially to an
exotic diet, on their own constitutions."41 If foreign foods presented a
threat to the European body, but travel was necessary for the European
colonialist project, how much more significant the developing preser-
vation techniques that would allow European colonists to bring with
them what they could of their own local foodstuffs, preserved? At the
heart of the threat of an exotic diet was the belief that foods had the
capability of changing one's bodily constitution, even, and especially, to
the point of altering one's racial or ethnic identity.
Shakespeare produces a composite figure in Cleopatra that combines
37 Steven Shapin, "'You are what you eat': Historical Changes in Ideas about Food and
Identity," Historical Research 87 no. 237 (2014): 380.
38 Quoted in ibid.
39 Stead, Necessities and Luxuries, 66.
40 Ibid.
41 Shapin, '"You are what you eat/" 383. Shapin notes earlier that by formulating dis-
tinctions between local and foreign fare, the "language of Galenic dietetics" contributed
to forming collective dietary identities within groups: "what foods suited the English, the
Scots, the Welsh, the French and the Spanish? In England, what suited people from the
west country and what suited Essex man?" Ibid., 382.

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Jennifer Park 611
her regional boundary-crossing, between the d
with her historical boundary-crossing, between
temporary. The tradition of a Cleopatra associa
and domestic practices was inherited through a
not isolated to the influx of receipt books that
mestic culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but was rather
a continuation of a culture of receipts that had been cultivated through
a long tradition of recording, compiling, transmitting, and experiment-
ing with a range of medical, alchemical, and occult knowledge. The evo-
lution of ancient medical knowledge into domestic culture continued to
be in play as early moderns developed their own household practices.
Receipts made for a richly complicated textual culture, and the genre
of receipt books was more open-ended than we might think today. The
receipt culture that lay at the heart of early modern domestic culture
included books of secrets, domestic manuals, health treatises, and com-
monplace books. Texts that contained receipts mixed recipes for medi-
cine, baking pies, making ink, creating beautifying cosmetics, and pro-
tecting from curses and recasting magical spells, often all within the
space of a single volume. Households would have had manuscript
recipes in their homes as well as published books of secrets, surgi-
cal receipts, and home remedies, all of which often cited other books
and receipts, including some Italian and French. Accordingly, the early
modern woman was expected to cultivate an expertise in a variety of
domestic concerns. A knowledge of plants, simples, and general physic
in addition to experience in constructing face washes, dressing venison,
and baking almond cakes, were all required for the purposes of proper
and thorough domestic household management. But where the early
modern housewife -or queen or duchess- may have developed an ex-
pertise in culinary, medical, and pharmacological knowledge, by way
of the hands-on nature of acquiring such experimental and experiential
knowledge in the kitchen, the figure of Cleopatra bypasses the develop-
mental stage as already a figure of medical authority. With Cleopatra
we get a female figure whose relationship to medicine and to receipt
culture throughout the centuries was strikingly different from that of
women in Shakespeare's time, and I argue that Shakespeare's Cleopatra
demonstrates how "Cleopatra's" ancient legacy interacts with Shake-
speare's modern-day practices and current concerns to produce a solu-
tion for preservation in the very act of becoming unpreserved.

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6i2 Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
PRESERVING AND UNPRESERVING SHAKESPEARE'S CLEOPATRA
To examine how Shakespeare integrates the ancient and th

ern, the domestic and exotic, in his construction of a pres
patra, I begin with Cleopatra's construction of her own s
of difference within the play. In one of her most celebr
sistic moments, Cleopatra imagines herself through Ant
the "serpent of old Nile . . . That am with Phoebus' amor
black / And wrinkled deep in time" (1.5.26 and 29-30). In
tion Cleopatra directs her audience's attention to the par
her physical and bodily presence on stage, forcing us to
or recognize her as a body of difference. By calling hersel
of old Nile," she claims her Egyptian heritage; by describ
"pinche[d]" black by the sun, she recognizes the blacknes
of her skin tone; and by characterizing her body as wrin
time," she both marks herself as an older, aged woman an
her association with a kind of eternal timelessness. Cleop
tite description of herself- as Egyptian, black, and aged-
tirely of qualities of marginalization in early modern En
same time, these qualities that would serve to marginalize
speare's time combine to construct a powerful identity w
to know as the exotic, foreign queen of Egypt. Cleopatra's
these marginalized qualities forces us to think about the p
her body. By bringing our attention to her Egyptian-ne
to her being "wrinkled deep in time," Cleopatra celebrat
as wrinkled, preserved flesh that was thought to be quin
Egyptian. Cleopatra's wrinkled, Egyptian body draws on
medical thought, in which the physical body was primari
through the influence of the four humors: blood, phlegm
and black bile. The prevailing early modern humoral the
maintained that the body, its composition and its functio
erned by these four humors, which were differentiated by le
and moisture. Because of its susceptibility to changes in h
ture, the humoral body was constantly prone to the influence
factors, and the influence of climate, environment, and r
and altered the humors within the body in ways that had
racial ramifications. The early moderns believed that the h
was responsible for darkening the skin of the Egyptians
the visual of Cleopatra's "tawny front"- as well as the ca
drying out of the body's humors.

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Jennifer Park 613
Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, as a bod
preservation, thus derives from the idea that her
could preserve. In contrast, Antony is described
tible to change; for example, Antony's stay in
complains, effeminizes him:
he . . . fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more manl
Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he.
(144-7)
According to early modern assumptions about hu
tween bodies from northern and southern regi
nization would have been seen as the result of t
undergoes upon his extended stay in Alexandria
Roman body, being colder and more moist, is mo
ence from the southern climates. Cleopatra's so
ties, on the other hand, are more durable. While
theory Cleopatra's complexion should be "soft a
woman, as an Egyptian she takes on the hotter a
cally considered to be masculine. The durability
ern qualities has much to do with the effect of
ment upon the body; those who lived in Egypt
drier, darker skin due to the hot and dry environ
human bodies for longer than did colder and w
gland, which, instead, "preserve[d] internal moist
bodies of Egyptians were thought to be embalme
in a way that northern bodies were not. Cleopa
that mimic preservation contribute to what scho
"ageless antiquity"; southerners like Cleopatr
scendants of the oldest civilizations," and their
correlated "with those of the elderly."43 Its dry
complexion "less vulnerable to decay or physical
quality of being well-preserved.
But Cleopatra's appeal to preservation goes beyo
Indeed, beyond her regional, Egyptian physicalit
42 Mary Floyd-Wilson, "Transmigrations: Crossing Region

in Antony and Cleopatra in Enacting Gender on the English
Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois
43 Ibid., 75.

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her role as ancient authority and early modern English preservative ex-
pert. As we will see, these work in tandem to create a Cleopatra that
proves both a preservative and altering threat from within and without.
Even before Cleopatra's self-description, Shakespeare situates himself
alongside the ancient traditions of Cleopatra early in the play and ges-
tures to his emphasis on the culinary as a mediating, preserving pres-
ence that bridges space and time, region and history.
In 1.2, Shakespeare stages a scene in which Cleopatra's servants inter-
act with a soothsayer who claims "In nature's infinite book of secrecy /
A little I can read" (1.2.8-9). When Cleopatra's servant Alexas then tells
Charmian to "Show him your hand," the scene is interrupted by the
entrance of Enobarbus, who suddenly interjects, "Bring in the banquet
quickly" (1.2.9-10). Charmian continues as if to ignore the interjection,
requesting the soothsayer to "give me good fortune" (1.2.12). In the ex-
change that follows, the soothsayer presents the following bits of fore-
sight: in the first, he tells Charmian that "You shall be yet far fairer than
you are," which Iras interprets as "you shall paint when you are old"
(1.2.15 17); in the second, he tells her that "You shall be more belov-
ing than beloved" (1.2.21); in the third, he tells her that "You shall outlive
the lady whom you serve" (1.2.29); and finally, to Charmian's question
about how many children she will have, the soothsayer responds that
"If every of your wishes had a womb, and fertile every wish, a million"
(1.2.35-36). What is striking about the soothsayer's main points is that
they address, respectively, books of secrets, painting (or cosmetics and
beauty), love, prolonged life, the womb, and fertility, all of which cor-
respond to how Cleopatra has been remembered through her apparent
medical expertise in cosmetics, aphrodisiacs, gynecology (and alchemy)
and, altogether, the secrets of preservation and the renewal of life.44
The soothsayer is dismissed by a disgruntled Charmian: "Out, fool!"
(1.2.37), but she then invites him to tell Iras her fortune. At this point,
Enobarbus interrupts yet again, saying that his and all of their for-
44 The soothsayer is also introduced into the scene by Alexas, who, as Cyrus Hoy has
pointed out, was likely a reference to Alexis of Piemont, whose book of secrets was pub-
lished widely- in England alone (in English translation) in 1558, 1560, 1562, 1569, 1595,
and into the seventeenth century. Hoy makes this connection in his notes to Thomas
Dekker's Satiromastix, in which "Alexis's secrets" appear in relation to Antony and Cleo-
patra in an otherwise bizarre reference in the play: "Come, busse thy little Anthony now, /
now, my cleane Cleopatria; so, so, goe thy waies, / Alexis secrets" (Introductions, Notes , and
Commentaries to Texts in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1980], 256).

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 615
tunes will be going drunk to bed; we can assum
on the banqueting festivities he requested in hi
Iras and Charmian then attempt to soothsay the
"There's a palm presages chastity, if nothing els
replies, "E'en as the o'erflowing Nilus presage
Charmian's reference to famine is telling at this
ine were the primary reason for the need to pre
glut, surplus foods would be preserved in order
life for times of need. Charmian's remark about the famine marks the
end of any further "productive" soothsaying.
Both of Enobarbus's interjections occur just as the soothsayer has been
asked to provide information, silencing the soothsayer both times until
he is requested to speak again. Thus, Shakespeare inserts references at
specific moments that are related to his interest in food preservation,
interrupting or dismissing the soothsayer's knowledge of secrets or dis-
missing soothsaying altogether. In addition, throughout this scene, as
requested by Enobarbus, we have the backdrop of the banquet on stage,
which at this time was not necessarily synonymous with a feast as we
might think of today but rather more typically meant the final, des-
sert course that would have consisted in large part of preserved food
items, such as preserved fruits, sweets, and other confections. It is thus
that in this rather strange scene near the beginning of the play, Shake-
speare introduces the cultural memory of Cleopatra's medical receipt
tradition and also launches his own intervention through Enobarbus's
and Charmian's passing mentions: his investment in a culinary form of
preservation and how that changes his audience's notion of a preserva-
tive Cleopatra.
Just as Charmian enigmatically concludes, "the o'erflowing Nilus
presageth famine," the idea of a preservative Cleopatra is significant
for early modern concerns with famine, and the juxtaposition of ex-
cessive fecundity with famine sets the stage for the dietary contrast be-
tween Egypt (Cleopatra) and Rome that Antony faces. Antony's, and
the Romans', relationship to the culinary begins as an image of famine,
as a point of anti-excess. Caesar produces a memory of Antony that dis-
tinguishes him from Egyptian food culture and fecundity, arguing that
on the contrary Antony had previously thrived in circumstances where
food was scarce. Bemoaning Antony's carousings in Alexandria, Caesar
pleads to an absent Antony to "Leave thy lascivious wassails" (1.4.57),
remembering fondly when

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at thy heel
Did famine follow, whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.
Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on.
(1.4.59-69)
Caesar finds admirable the Roman Antony who was forced to eat food
that had not been preserved but was rather what uncivilized "savages7'
might eat: the "stale of horses," "barks of trees," and "strange flesh" (un-
preserved). Caesar here depicts an environment that contrasts not only
with Antony's own dainty upbringing but also with the Egypt's land-
scape. Caesar, in a masculine discourse, implies that the preservation of
Antony's life depended not on the bounty produced by food preserva-
tion but on deprivation and a diet characterized as barbarous.
However, as Antony's exposure to Egypt begins to alter him, the
introduction of culinary metaphors in the play enters into his domes-
tic interactions in contrast to the realm of his public or political affairs.
Pompey, when considering the optimistic state of his own affairs com-
pared to Caesar's and Antony's, snidely dismisses any real threat they
pose to him, remarking that "Mark Antony / In Egypt sits at dinner, and
will make / No wars without doors" (2.1.11-13). Similarly, in a conver-
sation between Lepidus and Enobarbus, as they anticipate a tense meet-
ing between their respective leaders, Caesar and Antony, Lepidus is re-
luctant that they should meet with warring personal agendas and tells
Enobarbus, "'Tis not a time for private stomaching" (2.2.9), casting the
culinary as, again, a private domain.
Yet in the meeting between the two leaders, Lepidus opens by ask-
ing both to "Touch you the sourest points with sweetest terms." Dietary
knowledge promoted balance between different categories of food, pair-
ing opposite "humoral" qualities of foods together; thus vinegar was
often paired with sugar or salt, and other substances like honey or other
spices were often added to combinations of foods in ways that would
seem extravagant or incongruous to us today. The experience of "pri-
vate stomaching," then, speaks to knowledge of the balance required for

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 617
the health of consumers. After Antony and Ca
the agreed marriage between Caesar's sister Oct
ing the two men as brothers, Maecenas comm
to be glad that matters are so well digested" b
by noting that Enobarbus "stayed well by't
The matters well digested between Antony
ately juxtaposed against the excessive Egyptian
roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve p
91). Enobarbus's subsequent visually and sens
of Cleopatra's entrance into Antony's life via t
burnished gold, tissue, and the "strange invisib
the winds lovesick and hit "the sense / Of the
23)- is missing only the sensory satisfaction of
ised; Antony "goes to the feast, / And for his o
For what his eyes eat only" (2.2.234-36). That w
is, of course, Cleopatra, and for the rest of th
scribed as a thing for culinary consumption. In
Cleopatra announces, "I was a morsel for a m
echoes this, calling Cleopatra Antony's "fine E
whom "Julius Caesar / Grew fat with feasting
Enobarbus calls her Antony's "Egyptian dish"
patra's culinary portrayal serves not to limit he
of desire and for consumption but rather to fr
tress of preservation.
While the descriptors that portray Cleopatra'
have always been linked to her reputation as t
the gustatory -and cannibalistic- metaphors o
us to understand the material ways the early m
imagined the threat of the foreign and how Cle
ervation becomes a source of power over thos
her. Cleopatra's culinary power is best exempl
Pompey's descriptions of her, in which they re
tive standpoint- on the culinary appeal she pr
her. In Enobarbus's earlier speech, he rejects M
Antony will "leave . . . [Cleopatra] utterly" up
wife; rather, this is an impossibility precisely
Cleopatra's appeal:
Never. He will not.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

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Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
(2.3.244-48)
The significance of Cleopatra's exoticism and appeal is its longevity, as

Enobarbus so powerfully describes. Hers is an appetizing appeal that
the passing of time does not diminish: "Age cannot wither her." Nor
does familiarity and prolonged exposure to Cleopatra; custom cannot
"stale / Her infinite variety." Her age does not take away from her "fla-
vor," as it were; rather than becoming stale, she continues to provide
temptation to the appetite. So too is Cleopatra pitted against the idea
of cloying; where other women would have such an effect of "over-
load [ing] with food, so as to cause loathing; to surfeit or satiate with
over-feeding," or, particularly in this case, "with sameness of food,"45
Cleopatra rather continues to renew the appetite rather than weary it.
The appetite that she provokes is one that is long-lasting, fed by an eter-
nal freshness that can never be satisfied; her appeal is eternal because it
is constantly renewed- she provides an "infinite variety," always new
although eternal, always making hungry.
Thus we begin to see the contours of a state of preservation as a con-
stant renewal. Shakespeare's use of "stale" here, against which to pit
Cleopatra as its opposite, is a striking and intentional verbal echo of the
"stale" of horses drunk by the famine-afflicted Antony that Caesar so
admired. The shocking moment of drinking horses' stale was Antony's
response to the ravages of famine; having no access to fresh food, nor
to preserved items, his only option was to scavenge for whatever nutri-
tion he could find, which included horses' urine. In contrast, we are
presented with a Cleopatra who is decidedly the opposite of "stale," not
only in its form as the horse's urine that became a necessity during a
time of famine but also in its myriad senses of having "lost its freshness,
novelty, or interest."46 Cleopatra represents, rather, a different option
to the problem of famine in a form that resists the staleness prone to
the passing of time: through culinary preservation, Cleopatra's embodi-
ment reconciles the paradox between longevity and eternal freshness.
Shakespeare grounds this concept, of an infinite variety that con-
45 OED Online, s.v. "cloy, v.i," December 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www
.oed.com/view/Entry/34772 (accessed December 10, 2014).
46 OED Online, s.v. "stale, adj.i," June 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed
.com/view/Entry/i888oo?rskey=ePEknt&result=8&isAdvanced=false (accessed July 18,
2014).

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Jennifer Park 619
stantly makes hungry, in a powerful image- Po
strange descriptor, "Salt Cleopatra." Pompey her
preservative-inspired draw as he encourages Cle
of Antony as a means of distracting him from w
But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip!
Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both
Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts,
Keep his brain fuming. Epicurean cooks
Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite,
That sleep and feeding may prorogue his hon
Even till a Lethe'd dullness- [.]
(2.120-27)
The remarkable depiction of a gastronomically alluring Cleopatra cen-

ters on that powerful image of a "Salt Cleopatra." David Bevington con-
vincingly suggests that the use of salt as a descriptor here refers to "salted
or preserved meat," which was "more appetizingly reconstituted."47 We
can almost taste such a Cleopatra, and it is that salt that plays a role in
the culinary witchcraft that we imagine with flavorful foods. The result-
ing experience is aesthetic, sensory, and sensuous, in which witchcraft
joins with beauty and with lust. Pompey's investment in Cleopatra's
culinary magnetism is for her power over Antony; "Tie up the libertine"
he exclaims, "in a field of feasts, / Keep his brain fuming." The fuming
brain was an image and an experience that suggested for early moderns
a complicated threat to the preservation of the body and health. Some
fumes were thought to be sweet and nourishing for the brain, but more
often a fuming brain suggested a level of intoxication brought about
by the reaction of certain foods in the stomach. Cleopatra's effect on
Antony's fuming brain, Shakespeare suggests, derives from an insatia-
bility; his appetite is "sharpened] with cloyless sauce," again empha-
sizing Cleopatra's cloylessness, which works to postpone Antony's dis-
traction from his military duties but also to extend him in time toward
the process of a kind of preservation and prolonging of his current state,
at the center of which is Salt Cleopatra.
Advancements in salt preservation won England renown for the
"quality of their cured and salted meats and fish" among other countries.
Thus what would become a major staple of English cuisine depended
47 Bevington, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2005), 121.

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on the foreign import of Bay salt. Cleopatra, as "Salt" Cleopatra, recon-

stituted into a food item preserved and flavored in England's most cele-
brated way, is not only more "appetizingly reconstituted" and flavorful,
but Shakespeare presents her as an example of the intersection of do-
mestic process and exotic matter, a flesh product successfully preserved
by virtue of the imported ingredients that worked more effectively to
preserve flesh to last longer. The appeal of Cleopatra to the Romans
and to Shakespeare's viewers as salted meat was thus grounded in the
desire to incorporate and appropriate her.
Not only was Salt Cleopatra a preserved food item herself, but Shake-
speare depicts her as having mastery over those methods of preserva-
tion. Charmian reminds Cleopatra of a trick she once played on Antony,
when she had her diver "hang a salt fish upon his hook, which he / With
fervency drew up" (2.5.17-18). "Salt" here has fittingly been glossed as
"preserved" and refers quite literally to salted fish, which were among
the first food items to undergo mass preservation. As herself a salted
morsel, Cleopatra, as Shakespeare implies, would have been aware of
the parallel between herself and the salted fish, a traditionally Egyptian
product and export, and her awareness informs her mastery and ma-
nipulation of Antony, who "with fervency" draws up both the salted
fish and Cleopatra herself.
It is thus that we begin to see evidence of Cleopatra's mastery of culi-
nary preservative methods as a form of knowledge of the behavior of
flesh toward preservation. Immediately following, Cleopatra threatens
to punish a messenger by whipping him and having him "stewed in
brine, / Smarting in ling'ring pickle!" (2.5.66-67). He had just delivered
the unfortunate news that Antony has remarried, and Cleopatra's re-
sponse is to strike him and threaten to subject him to food preservation
processes as a form of torture and the execution of her area of expertise.
Brining and pickling were forms of salt-based preservation known as
wet-salting, according to which fish or meats could be stewed and pre-
served in brine in jars or wooden barrels until use.48 It was additionally
perceived to be an Egyptian burial practice by the early moderns; in
his 1606 treatise against interment, William Birnie notes among various
cultural funeral preparations that "the Greke and Romane did burne
their dead, in rogo, as they styled their funerali fire; the Indean with
Got-seame did besmeare, the Schithean swallied, the Egiptian pickled
with bryme."49 That Cleopatra calls upon brining and pickling for a
48 C. Anne Wilson, introduction, in "Waste Not, Want Not ," ed. Wilson, 16-17.
49 Birnie, The blame of kirk-buriall, tending to perswade cemiteriall ciuilitie First preached,

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Jennifer Park 621
whipped servant constructs not only an uneasy
human body and food that is likely to spoil but
harm that flesh is prone to and the idea that pr
kind of violence. The explicit conflation of food
inforces the play's nod to a system of not-so-me
in which Cleopatra clearly understands herself
which for early modern audiences would not ha
as it is today. Notably, Cleopatra's command her
of preserving flesh, and her choice of brining an
two conflicting domains of the exotic and the d
burial practice and as early modern English culi
produce a punishment that takes advantage of th
What Cleopatra realizes as a master of preserv
vation occurs through the interaction of incorru
vulnerable or corruptible substances- that in fa
stances form the primary ingredient needed for
The workings of incorruptible substances on corr
lowed the logic of humoral physiology. Accordi
all creatures and plants had ¿heir own inherent c
used for food, their humoral properties would
which would assimilate those qualities. For exam
"choleric" (hot and dry) would transfer those qu
who consumed it. Foods in the vulnerable or cor
required these incorruptible substances for pres
"flesh" foods, making "flesh" a marker of vulner
cluded meats and fish as well as fruits and were
ticularly prone to putrefaction with time and h
and abuse- of food preservation in violent w
flesh as prone and vulnerable. Early modern diet
cerned about the corruptibility of flesh foods,
stances that were qualitatively "hot" themselves
These incorruptible substances would prevent
venting unnatural heat- the cause of putrefacti
would spoil food.50
Cleopatra's earlier warning resonates with both
tices and her knowledge of such incorruptibl
then penned, and now at last propyned to the Lords inheritance in
M. William Birnie the Lord his minister in that ilk , as a pledge of
mation (Edinburgh, 1606).
50 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Un
2002), 159.

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eluded other substances that were thought to have preservative powers

by virtue. The same messenger in danger of being pickled had mo-
ments before been imperiled by Cleopatra; even before he speaks, she
threatens that if he does so "The gold I give thee will I melt and pour /
Down thy ill-uttering throat" (2.5.34-35). Gold and pearls, incorrupt-
ible substances, were similarly used for preservative purposes, ground
into foods or drink as "life-preserving fluids" such as drinkable gold or
"aurum potabile."51 Pliny the Elder was said to have written the legend
that Cleopatra dissolved a pearl in vinegar and drank the result;52 the
gold Cleopatra threatens to melt and pour down the messenger's throat
recalls the idea of drinkable gold as a life-preserving fluid. The unfor-
tunate messenger thus serves as a kind of marionette for Cleopatra
with which to experiment, showcasing her mastery of preservation
practices. But the sinister nature of the melted gold poured down his
throat in addition to his potential salt-preservation in brine combine to
demonstrate Cleopatra's understanding of the paradoxical valences be-
tween the vulnerability of flesh to pain and violence- human flesh as
human- and the protection that preservation provides- human flesh
as food.
Best exemplified in Cleopatra's anxiety about discandying, Cleo-
patra's manipulation of preservation demonstrates her intimate knowl-
edge of the vulnerabilities of flesh and the powers of preservation. So
too, her intimate dialogue with Antony reveals her self-awareness of the
threat of unpreserving. Antony, following Cleopatra's retreat during a
sea battle with Caesar, is brought to a fury at seeing Cleopatra entertain
Thidias, whom Caesar has sent to persuade her to join with him: "To
flatter Caesar," Antony pushes, "would you mingle eyes / With one that
ties his points?" (3.13.160-61) Antony continues, "Cold-hearted toward
me?" (3.13.162) to which Cleopatra replies,
Ah, dear, if I be so,
From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,
51 Ibid., 103 and 159.

52 See Prudence J. Jones on the history and criticism of this story, in "Cleopatra's Cock-
tail/' Classical World 103 (2010): 207-20. For more on vinegars with a gloss on the aforemen-
tioned "cocktail/7 see also Stefano Mazza and Yoshikatsu Murooka, "Vinegars Through
the Ages," in Vinegars of the World, ed. Lisa Solieri and Paolo Giudici (Milan: Springer- .
Verlag Italia, 2009), 17-39, esP- *8. Mazza and Murooka speculate that the Egyptians were
probably the first to discover and use vinegar, explaining the effect of climate in regions
such as Egypt on the production of vinegar: "the hot, dry climate of the desert encouraged
a quick fermentation, rapidly turning grape juice into an indeterminate alcoholic-acidic
beverage" (18).

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Jennifer Park 623
And poison it in the source, and the first ston
Drop in my neck; as it determines, so
Dissolve my life! The next Caesarion smite,
Till by degrees the memory of my womb,
Together with my brave Egyptians all,
By the discandying of this pelleted storm
Lie graveless till the flies and gnats of Nile
Have buried them for prey!
(3.13.162-71)
It is important to note here how the image of

patra's speech is integrated into a larger imagine
texts from earlier traditions of Cleopatra. Placi
side by side with the Dialogue of Cleopatra and th
ered among one of the earliest alchemical texts,
which her speech draws on much of the Dialogue
logue , the philosophers tell Cleopatra,
In thee is concealed a strange and terrible mystery. E
light upon the elements. . . . tell us how the blessed
lying in Hades fettered and afflicted in darkness and
reaches them and rouses them as if wakened by the
and how the new waters . . . penetrate them at the be
tion and how a cloud supports them and how the clou
rises from the sea.53
To this, Cleopatra responds,

The waters, when they come, awake the bodies and the
oned and weak. For they again undergo oppression a
and yet in a little while they grow and rise up . . .
For I tell this to you who are wise
ished in the fire and the embryo grows little by little nour
womb, and when the appointed month approaches is not re
ing forth. . . . The waves and surges one after another in H
the tomb where they lie. When the tomb is opened they issu
babe from the womb.54
Linden notes that much of the imagery reflects "the

condensation of the liquids undergoing distillation."5
imagery of death and resurrection references the prod
53 Quoted in Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 45.

54 Quoted in ibid.
55 Ibid.

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losopher's stone, one of the primary end goals of alchemy, and Cleo-
patra's statement above is "a very early instance of use of the analogy be-
tween the birth of a child and preparation of the philosopher's stone."56
The alchemical imagery of the Dialogue mixes meteorological, gyneco-
logical, and death imagery in order to produce an analogy for the pro-
duction of the Philosopher's Stone, which was also referred to as "Medi-
cine" or "Elixir," one of the purposes of which was "healing the human
body of its diseases and extending longevity."57 The figure of Cleopatra
the alchemist was, Linden notes, "one of very few ancient female adepts
who possessed the secret of the philosopher's stone."58
Shakespeare's Cleopatra notably combines the same sets of imagery-
meteorology, gynecology, and death/resurrection- in professing a ver-
bal commitment to the constancy of her love for Antony. The intermin-
gling of different kinds of imagery explains and perhaps clarifies some
of the enigmatic nature of the speech and its convoluted syntax, which
has been difficult to interpret, but Shakespeare uses it toward the pro-
duction of a renewal of love between Antony and Cleopatra. In the play,
Cleopatra uses this as a kind of self-imposed curse if she fails to love
Antony and directs her use of the imagery toward death and an image
of anti-preservation. If she is cold-hearted toward Antony, "From my
cold heart let heaven engender hail," which poisons her at the source
and leads to the dissolving of her life, the smiting of her next child, and
the process, "by degrees," of a kind of de-preserving of the "memory of
her womb" and her "brave Egyptians all." The memory of her womb
and her Egyptians, all of which comprise the bodily manifestations of
the memory of Cleopatra, are, in this curse, left "graveless till the flies
and gnats of Nile / Have buried them for prey"- an image of the decay
and decomposition that accompanies death- as the result of the "dis-
candying of this pelleted storm." While the image of discandying has
usually been read as but another synonym for a dissolution, political
or otherwise,59 the image's significance derives from its culinary refer-
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., l6.
58 Ibid., 44.
59 Peter A. Parolin notes that critics have often seen Antony and Cleopatra as a play
about dissolution; see his "'A Cloyless Sauce': The Pleasurable Politics of Food in Antony
and Cleopatra ," in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays , ed. Sara Munson Deats (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2005), 213-29. A few scholars have examined discandying in the context
of melting imagery. C. H. Hobday associates the specific imagery of melting sweets pri-
marily with dogs in early modern dining areas who would lick sweetmeats and drop
them "in a semi-melting condition all over the place." In his reading of the use of "dis-
candy" in Antony and Cleopatra, Hobday focuses on the cluster of images that relate dogs,

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Jennifer Park 625
enee; when Cleopatra calls upon the act of "disc
suades her audience to reconceptualize this enti
and "pelleted storm"- as complicit in a culinary
"pelleted storm," for example, Bevington has g
a compressed meat ball," which, I imagine, beco
sweet meat that has been candied.60 From the va
modern audience who would have been familiar
such method of using sugar for preservation, th
pelleted storm" would have had resonances with
tality.
If candying promised a near-perfect state of preservation, Shake-
speare's discandying dismantled that ideal. In Antony's echo of Cleo-
patra's discandying, he posits the two in contrast to each other- he is
left unpreserved by an episode of discandying that, in turn, results in a
candied Caesar:
O sun, thy uprise I shall see no more.

Fortune and Antony part here; even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar.
(4.12.18-23)
Antony's supporters, the "hearts / That spanieled me at heels," undergo

the process of discandying, losing their protected and preserved state.
Instead, the hearts of his once-followers "melt their sweets" on Caesar,
and in doing so, the process of discandying turns back into the process
of candying, melting off of Antony onto Caesar upon whom the melted
"sugar-candy" will harden once more to a protective and preserving
candied shell. Caesar is figuratively being candied by these melted
sugar, and flattery as evidence of melting and sweets as images of flattery and dog-like
fawning. While I do see, particularly in Antony's use of "discandy/' the relationship to
flattery in the way Hobday suggests, I argue that this is not enough in exploring the im-
plications of Shakespeare's invention of this word. I suggest there is more going on here,
particularly in locating the process of discandying in the context of food preservation.
See Hobday, "Why The Sweets Melted: A Study in Shakespeare's Imagery," Shakespeare
Quarterly 16 (1965): 3-17. Floyd-Wilson also takes a look at the melting imagery of "dis-
candy," noting that "The discandying that Cleopatra envisions appears to mirror Antony's
own dissolving state, with the exception that her melting is an imagined punishment for
betrayal, couched in an invocation that preserves her authority. Antony, in contrast, when
his followers desert him, associates 'discandying' with the ultimate surrender of one's self
to another" ("Transmigrations," 83-84).
60 Bevington, Antony and Cleopatra, 204.

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Ó2Ó Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra
sweets, and like flowers that were candied, "blossoming" Caesar can
be figuratively preserved and kept in a state that prolongs his current
status, both politically and mortally. In other words, Antony imagines
Caesar's preservation as a process of candying that will keep Caesar in-
tact against time's decaying.
The image of a candied Caesar is meant to demonstrate the merits of
being preserved intact, and the parallel between the state of being can-
died and the state of being embalmed would not have been missed. Cleo-
patra, after all, would have been thought to be embalmed as an Egyp-
tian by virtue of Egypt's hot and dry climate that produced, in a sense,
already embalmed bodies that were well-preserved. Furthermore, the
image of the embalmed, candied body necessarily invites association
with the embalmed, mummified bodies of the Egyptians. Embalming,
the preservation of the human corpse, was famously an Egyptian death
ritual, sometimes appropriated in Roman funeral rituals using Roman
"variations" of "traditional Egyptian techniques."61 In a historical recon-
struction of his speech before his final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra,
Octavian comments on the Egyptian practice of embalming "their own
bodies to give them the semblance of immortality."62 These bodies were
often prepared with an aromatic substance generally called "balm,"
a soothing and healing ointment that would preserve the bodies in a
candied-like state.63 Cleopatra herself ends her life in the play with an
exclamation of her death "As sweet as balm" (5.2.305), inviting the asso-
ciation of her death with the preferred state of being preserved, can-
died.64 The image of candying as embalming thus circles back to Cleo-
patra as herself an example of an Egyptian body whose potential was
to be embalmed.
61 Derek B. Counts, "Re gum Externorum Consuetudine: The Nature and Function of
Embalming in Rome/7 Classical Antiquity 15 (1996): 191. Counts seeks to explain evidence
for embalming in Rome and to address some motives for and implications of the use of
embalming in early Imperial Rome, where cremation was the dominant rite after death.
Embalming was typically ridiculed as something less civilized people did to their dead.
62 Dio, 50.24, trans. E. Carey, Loeb edition. Quoted in ibid.
63 The OED lists this definition of balm as "An aromatic preparation for embalming
the dead/' used between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. See OED Online, s.v.
"balm, n.i," December 2015, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry
/i50i6?rskey=LQWTpn&result=i&isAdvanced=false (accessed February 05, 2016).
64 While I do not go further into embalming and funereal practices in early modern En-
gland here, I do want to note that embalming was practiced "among the middle and upper
classes" as a "fairly common practice," and by the eighteenth century, embalming was
practiced "by all except the lower classes." For more on embalming practices in England,
see Jolene Zigarovich, "Preserved Remains: Embalming Practices in Eighteenth-Century
England," Eighteenth-Century Life 33 (2009): 65-104, esp. 67-68.

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 62 7
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that embalmed
representative of preservation and immortality,
early modern Europeans. The protection of such b
balmed state fed into the early modern assump
stances that derived from those bodies, substances
mumia. In early modern medical texts, there is freque
consumption of "mummy," sometimes described
fluid, or powder made from mummified bodies.
to contain leftover traces of vital spirit and was o
be taken or prepared from actual Egyptian mumm
power to preserve human bodies through a transfe
and an embalmed, preserved state in the process
strong cannibalistic implications of Cleopatra's po
to be eaten or fed upon lock into her connection to m
of sanctioned, medicinal cannibalism in which ear
and Europe-at-large took part.66 Mummy provide
Shakespeare's portrayal of Cleopatra theorized- an
morsel, exotic and foreign like Cleopatra, that the
corporated into or onto their bodies in the hopes o
If Caesar could be imagined to be candied over,
patra-all the more given her depiction as a preserv
sumed: a veritable mummy to be ingested for wh
even more so was Cleopatra's body quite literally
died over; her status as a potentially candied, emb
sects with her portrayal as a "painted" or cosmetic
section that also finds its way into the early mode
the form of what I term culinary cosmetics. Both
were part of a network of an early modern domes
ture that used many of the same incorruptible ingr
ticularly, given its tempering qualities, was used i
ber of cosmetic recipes. A candied Cleopatra was t
literally sugared over.
Thus, in depicting Cleopatra as a preserved m
Shakespeare is forcing us to consider quite literally
on her skin- to rethink the implications of Cleopa
In a discourse that was already racialized in the p
paints straddled the porous divide between pre
65 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 69.
66 For more on mummy as medicinal cannibalism, see Louis
balism in Early Modern Literature and Culture (New York: Palgra

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tion.67 On the one hand, what cosmetics promised was the preservation
of youth and beauty. On the other hand, it was thought that cosmetics,
as part of a network of culinary production and consumption that in-
cluded washes, salves, and ingestible items, had the potential to actu-
ally transform English bodies. As a part of culinary domestic culture,
the production and use of cosmetics resonated with concerns about poi-
sonous foods and the threat of foreign ingredients as detrimental to the
English body. But the culinary and cosmetic practices that allowed for
the preservation of foods and of bodies were predicated on the incor-
poration of those foreign ingredients into the English kitchen for use
in methods of preserving. The paradox of the use of cosmetics is indi-
cated by the tensions between widespread private use among women
of cosmetics and strong public objections to cosmetics that included the
"ethnocentric fear of foreign ingredients and commodities of a cosmetic
nature."68
Recipes for cosmetics and for food were found side by side in receipt
books and miscellanies of the period, and cosmetic recipes often called
for some of the same culinary ingredients as food recipes in domes-
tic manuals like Hugh Piatt's Delightes for Ladies , which was published
in sixteen editions between 1602 and 1656, a testament to its popu-
larity and widespread use among women in the early modern house-
hold. Most scholarship on domestic cosmetics use in early modern En-
gland has focused on face-painting and its adverse effects on women's
bodies. However, for women, cosmetic culture was primarily about
preserving youth and life, or at least preserving the appearance thereof.
When Charmian asks for her fortune and is told that she "shall yet be
far fairer than you are" (1.2.16), she interprets, "He means in flesh," as
preservation of youth or the return to a more youthful physical fair-
ness (1.2.17). response, Iras reinterprets the soothsayer to mean not
a return to a youthful physical fairness but rather to mean the inevita-
67 For more on cosmetics, race, and performance in early modern England, see Camp-
bell, "Maculophobia"; Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance
Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Kimberly Poitevin, "Inventing
Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England," Journal for Early Mod-
ern Cultural Studies 11 (2011): 59-89; Tanya Pollard, "'Polluted with Counterfeit Colours':
Cosmetic Theater," in her Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005); Edith Snook, "'The Beautifying Part of Physic': Women's Cosmetic
Practices in Early Modern England," Journal of Women's History 20.3 (2008): 10-33; and
Andrea Stevens, Inventions of the Skin : The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400-1642
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
68 Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama , 34.

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 629
bility of cosmetics use: "No, you shall paint when
Charmian responds with an anxiety-ridden "Wr
31). Charmian's anxiety reveals the (early moder
the physical repercussions of age on the body in
decidedly contrary to Cleopatra's celebration of
in time" and the use of paints to hide evidence
face-painting practices often stemmed from a fear
mortality, many ingredients used in cosmetic re
be detrimental to our bodies, like mercury and l
ents covered up the body and face while contrib
ration. Thus, while women were attempting to p
fight off the effects of age, their use of cosmet
teriorating effects much more rapidly.69
Advertising for cosmetics, of course, claime
recipes would enable women to create cosmetics
steps of youth, and transforme the wrinkled h
tender skin of a tempting Helena in other word
gued was that "wearing cosmetics will sustain lif
metics could sustain or preserve life was verifi
and acceptable branch of cosmetics known as
legitimized as a part of an early modern profes
concerned with the preservation of health. As su
did not inspire the "vitriolic antifeminist attack
The distinction between condemned face paints
was voiced by various doctors and anti-cosmetic
physician, in English translation in Thomas Tuke
use of paints, writes,
Yet do I not altogether mislike, that honest women
and seeke to make their faces smooth, but that they s
or the water of Lupines, or the juice of Lymons, and in
Dioscorides prescribes as cleanely, and delicate to clear t
The rhetoric of washing, cleaning, and clearing,

on the use of culinary ingredients associated wit
mizes this cosmetic practice as concerned with th
sonal hygiene. Edith Snook has brought attentio
recipes recorded for beautifying physic rather t
69 Ibid., 45.
70 From Thomas Jeamson, Artificiali Embellishments (quoted in ibid., 58).
71 Tuke, A discourse against painting and tincturing of women (London, 1616), B3v-B4r.

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ing recipes for "face washes and ointments, beautifying concoctions

that transform the skin rather than cover it [emphasis mine]/'72
The distinction between transformation and covering is significant.
In practice the distinction was rather ambiguous- cosmetics could and
did both cover and transform. The key to cosmetic transformation, how-
ever, comes from what I term the gastrohumoral properties of the in-
gredients used. Sugar, for example, was "a thinge verye temperate and
nourysshynge," easy on the stomach and capable of balancing other
ingredients.73 As such, sugar was used in various recipes for medici-
nal washes; a manuscript recipe for 'An Excellent wash for the face"
calls for the use of "a quarter of a pound of white suger candie pounded
small."74 The production of cosmetics was thus connected to kitchen
physic and domestic medical preparations that included healing potions
and medicinal syrups, various forms of medications for consuming and
for applying. But distinctions between poisonous face paints and heal-
ing medical treatments were much more porous in actuality; as Snook
identifies, "paint could be a medicine and washes and pomatums could
be paints."75 Recipe books reflected the imprecision of these distinc-
tions-certain cosmetics "both covered and transformed"76- and thus,
cosmetics straddled a complexly porous boundary between poison and
preservative.
As a part of culinary domestic culture, the production and use of cos-
metics resonated with concerns about poisonous foods and the threat
of foreign ingredients as detrimental to the English body. At the same
time, cosmetics were used widely for their preservative- or transfor-
mative-potential for beauty and youth. Additionally, the conflation
of food and bodies, and of food and cosmetics, prompts us to exam-
ine Cleopatra's candied appeal as both culinary and cosmetic- the culi-
nary body as cosmeticized and thus the cosmeticized body as culinary.
Shakespeare's Cleopatra, rather than the ancient, abstracted author or
authority on cosmetics, is materialized as a product herself of such cos-
metic, or culinary, expertise. Her reference to candying and discandy-
ing brings attention to her cosmeticization, engaging us to ask how her
candied cosmetics play into her threat or promise of exoticism.
72 Snook, "'The Beautifying Part of Physic/" 10.
73 From Thomas Elyot's Castel ofHelth (1547), an example of the kind of early modern
domestic and medical manual that contained information about maintaining good health.
74 Recipe in a seventeenth- century manuscript of cookery and medicinal recipes at the
Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.a.562).
75 Snook, "The Beautifying Part of Physic/" 13.
76 Ibid., 34.

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Jennifer Park 631
Because the very application of cosmetics was
tive, early modern anxieties about cosmetics pr
dangerously porous boundaries between appea
and reality or truth. Mimetic representation for
poraries was dangerous because it encroached
made culinary cosmetics all the more dangerous
of mimetic representation were also dangers of
the environment and food affected one's racial
habited a middle ground between external and i
the body's humors; cosmetics were applied exte
of the skin, but its culinary properties worked t
inherent humoral composition in the way the sam
did when ingested. In fact, even mummy was a
stances to be ingested and those to be applied as
early modern English recipes, the aims of which
ervation of dead flesh against putrefaction, the h
gevity, and beautifying the face when combine
wash.78
The paranoia about cosmetics, then, is in dialog
noia, and the danger of both was latent in the
Antony's echo of Cleopatra's discandying serves
Shakespeare's usage as "To melt or dissolve ou
condition."79 If the purposes of candying were
they were, Cleopatra's call for a process of di
to be a troubling image indeed, one that she po
tions for the undoing of a protective, embalmed
sugared materiality of the discandying of Cleop
forces us to imagine a highly visceral process of
verses that of candying, a melting away of the
ened, candied preserved state. The threat of disc
a failure of preservation; for Antony, the process o
his anxiety about depending upon external follow
tion of his fortune, his life, and thus his self. In
speech, which is difficult to parse and enigmatic, w
discandying registers as a curse.
77 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Represen

Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 4.
78 See Wellcome Library manuscripts MS.761, MS.762.
79 OED Online , s.v. "+ dis'candy, v.," November 2010, Oxf
cessed January 23, 2011).

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
The process of discandying that Cleopatra imagines connects to her

exclamation "Dissolve my life!" Critics are right in noting that this pro-
cess is one of dissolution; Cleopatra uses the word "discandy" as a type
of violence -to destroy distinctions, to dissolve. But furthermore, dis-
candying, by removing or melting away the candied, protective, and
preservative shell, would leave the pelleted flesh food vulnerable to the
threat of putrefaction and decay. This is how Cleopatra ends: with the
image of "the memory of my womb / Together with my brave Egyp-
tians all, / . . . Lie graveless till the flies and gnats of Nile / Have buried
them for prey!" Bevington's gloss is helpful here: the flies and gnats
have buried them by eating them. The pelleted storm, imagined as can-
died meatballs, may be thought to be themselves discandying- the
literal discandying of the pelleted storm. So, too, Cleopatra imagines
the bodies of relation to her discandying: the memory of Cleopatra's
womb- her progeny- as well as her Egyptians, her people, once em-
balmed by the preservative qualities of Egypt, are by virtue of the "dis-
candying of this pelleted storm" stripped of that protection, left to de-
cay and decompose. Cleopatra voices the fear that discandying or being
discandied leaves one prone to putrefaction and dissolution, reso-
nating not only with the decay of dead bodies but also with the failure
to memorialize one's legacy.
At the same time, discandying is what allows Cleopatra as a morsel
to exert power over her consumers. In a sense, what results through her
discandying is the potential to leave another kind of legacy, perpetu-
ating in a different way, preserving as an infinite variety. Cleopatra as
preserved food and as preservative is the racial, foreign, exotic threat,
and her threat of discandying ultimately voices both the danger and the
promise she would pose as a foreign preservative, as potential mummy
that could transfer her properties to those who ingested her. In melting
gastronomically, she dissolves to become a part of her consumer, trans-
ferring her inherently racially and regionally "other" qualities, foreign,
exotic, preservative, and/or poisonous. In other words, as culinary she
embodies the threat and promise of both transformation and preserva-
tion. Cleopatra's threats to discandy echo the melting process that hap-
pens gastronomically in the body, making her body not only vulnerable
to decay but also susceptible to a dissolution that, in the body, would
alter the state of whoever consumed her.
In a sense, Shakespeare's portrayal of Cleopatra as a preserved food
item can be read as a futile early modern English attempt at domes-
ticating her. Cleopatra-qua-mummy provides the intersection of the

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC
Jennifer Park 633
culinary and the cosmetic, the fear of and desi
the desire at once for preservation and transfo
power over other bodies upon being consume
patra's resistance to being appropriated in the wa
English desire. She instead reveals early modern
attempts as a denial of foreign influence and a
about its efficacy. Fittingly, Cleopatra does not
feared, nor is she embalmed and preserved after
candied state. Rather, she is to be "buried by her
the threat she posed while living continues in he
she lived: in a liminal state between immortal pr
decay in an inevitable process of (gastronomic)
to prevent the decay/dissolution of her memory
her consumer. It is thus that she perseveres by alte
consuming audience. Cleopatra's definition of
stant renewal thus provides a commentary on th
performance for Shakespeare's viewers: "The
temporally will stage us, and present / Our Ale
proclaims. Such unpremeditated staging, howev
standing deeply engrained in collective cultural
tions of preservation Cleopatra represents. Alth
"squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / 1' the p
through her embeddedness in the cultures of pre
mortal longings" find fruition: in the "infinite v
tion and her performance.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

203.10.59.73 on Sat, 24 Jul 2021 04:07:15 UTC

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Discandying Cleopatra: Preserving Cleopatra's Infinite Variety in Shakespeare's "Antony

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921900

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Cleopatra invokes the "discandying of this pelleted storm."1 In the

1 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge

© 2016 Studies in Philology, Incorporated

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cess involving the melting of sugar to form a hardened, "candied" shell.

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6 See my "Navigating Past, Potential, and Paradise: The G

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CLEOPATRA'S ANCIENT MEDICAL AUTHORITY

Overlooked in studies of circulating receipts in a growing

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In addition to the medical traditions, the preservative authority of Cleo-

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It was thus that receipts advertised as secrets b

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the Little World (1599).18 This is confirmed by the appearance of receipts

Here are two descriptive receipts, marked by their beginning "And it is

18 Allott, Wits Theater of the Little World (London, 1599), 75V.

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Here again we find a descriptive receipt for the r

So that if we cannot moderate these perturbations of the mi

Cleopatra's name appears to stand in for her book, fr

This receipt is reiterated in his later section on "Secret

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Wecker directly references the Book of Cleopatra as a material text-

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ANCIENT LEGACY AND EARLY MODERN

What did it mean to preserve? The idea of preserving, i

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Thus, when Shakespeare uses the term "discandy," he does so inten-

Early modern women were becoming increasingly familiar with can-

30 Terttu Nevalainen, "Shakespeare's New Words," in Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic

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anonymous manual was meant for "Ladies and Gentlewomen" implies

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To examine how Shakespeare integrates the ancient and th

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42 Mary Floyd-Wilson, "Transmigrations: Crossing Region

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The significance of Cleopatra's exoticism and appeal is its longevity, as

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The remarkable depiction of a gastronomically alluring Cleopatra cen-

47 Bevington, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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on the foreign import of Bay salt. Cleopatra, as "Salt" Cleopatra, recon-

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eluded other substances that were thought to have preservative powers

51 Ibid., 103 and 159.

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It is important to note here how the image of

To this, Cleopatra responds,